MikeFitz with overflow bit set…

Haven’t heard from Mike for a while?

Well, after a slight medical outage earlier in the year, it was decided to stick to Plan A.  Mike is here…

Full itinerary here.

Who said Facebook is just for the youngsters?  I don’t know when the Australian War Memorial created its Facebook page but a couple of days ago I saw this advertisement on my Facebook news feed.

Clicking on the ad took me to an Event page for the ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the War Memorial’s parade ground.  The Event page has an “Export” button so you can add the Dawn Service to your Outlook calendar.

Yes, I’ll be attending, and then it’s off to Code Camp Oz in Wagga Wagga.

Yes, “Laws” - plural.  I remember being taught that Murphy actually had three laws.

• Murphy’s Law 1: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
  (We all know this one.)
• Murphy’s Law 2: Document! Document! Document!
  (All bureaucrats know this one because, when Law 1 applies, one needs to have one’s backside protected.)
• Murphy’s Law 3: …
  (Nobody knows this one.  Apparently, Murphy forgot to write it down.)

———————
I’ve had some time to sit still and think about this recently after Law 1 applied to me in a medical sense.  I posted this as a comment over on the blog of Western Australian mate, Archie, who promoted it to his list of Collected Quotes About Science (Sort Of).  Thanks, Archie.

April also means ANZAC Day and CodeCampOz.

ANZAC Day

Mrs Fitz, #1 Son and I will be at the dawn service at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.  Afterwards, we have an assignment to do in the memorial.  A teacher friend is doing a module on ANZAC Day with her class and has asked us to gather some information from the museum.

Code Camp Oz

Afterwards, we’ll be off to Wagga Wagga for CodeCampOz.

• Fri 25, Sat 26 and Sun 27 Apr 08
• Wal Fife Theatre, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga
• A .NET developer community driven event. Two and a half intense days of sessions on current development topics featuring the latest (Visual Studio 2008) and up-coming (SQL Server 2008) development tools.
• It is free to attend.
  See www.codecampoz.com for more details.
• Peter and I will be there!

It’s April!  You know what that means - April Fools Day jokes.

The Freeze

A local chapter of Improv Everywhere staged a five-minute Flashmob Freeze in Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall at 1pm.  It was all over the local media.  Well done, folks.

The Fake Resignation

Scotty blogged that he had resigned from Microsoft and was off to Pixar.  For a second there, he really had me going.

The Comic Circle

• One of my favourite web comics, xkcd (www.xkcd.com) redirected everyone to another really good comic, Questionable Content (questionablecontent.net).
• Questionable Content redirected everyone to Dinosaur Comics (www.qwantz.com)
• Dinosaur Comics redirected everyone to xkcd.

One poor soul had all three comics bookmarked close to each other and thought that his Firefox was playing a practical joke on him.

The Funniest Joke of All

The funniest joke was one that Randall didn’t even have to write.  At xkcd, all the comics are numbered.  The last comic published before April 1 was number 403 at http://www.xkcd.com/403/.  The next cartoon published after April 1 was number 405 at http://www.xkcd.com/405/.

Why was number 404 skipped?  That’s right, have a look at http://www.xkcd.com/404/.  HTTP Error 404: Page not found. HaHa!

www.clickncolour.com

Now and then comes an opportunity to work on a project that not only makes the client happy, but is also actually fun to work on.

ClickNColour.com is the online art gallery of local artist Debbie Neale.

While working as a teacher aide, Debbie noticed that most colouring-in artwork was directed at younger children.  She has now created a portfolio of designs which are challenging enough for older students and adults, even rehabilitation patients.

On the website you can purchase downloadable copies of Debbie’s artwork as well as order Debbie’s printed colouring-in books.

Is this the road to peace?

I don’t think so.

Palestinian relatives of the Atallah family mourn during the funeral of six family members on March 2, 2008, after they were killed during an Israeli air raid in Gaza City the day before.
Photo: Mahmud Hams, AFP - via abc.net.au

I have a Facebook friend, Sana Ahmed who lives in the Gaza strip.  A week ago I asked her this question…

We see such terrible things in the conflict between Palestine and Israel. I’d like to hear what you or any of your friends would answer to this question:

“What has to happen before Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace?”

Sana’s immediate response…

Read the rest of this entry »

… in binary.  That’s 32 years in decimal.  Mrs Fitz says you get less for murder.

Anyhow, Thank you Mrs Fitz for being the most wonderful wife and mother to our three sons.

Yep, Australia Day tomorrow and the boys are organising their annual Australia Day Pool Party/BBQ again at our place.

Check out the photos of last year’s party which was a tremendous success.  Dugie tells me that he and I both make it in the top 5 google images hits for “australia day bbq“.

I had to drive Pete’s car today because he borrowed the 4WD to pick up Andy’s batch of home brew from the bottling joint.  It’s all now on ice, ready to go.

The event was advertised on Facebook months ago. (Not publicly, though.)  If 500 people show up, I’m gonna hafta pretend Corey Delaney organised it.

’AveAGood’Un.

It has been interesting to watch the fluctuations in the number of pages returned by the Google search, (died in a blogging accident), referred to in my previous post.  As many commenters have noted, the number goes up and the number goes down.

It seems there are three forces at work here:

1. Clowns like me, MrCopilot and now Archie, create blog posts containing the phrase “died in a blogging accident”, the number goes up.
2. Spambots recognise the activity and start creating even more spam blog posts containing the phrase, the number goes up some more.  Here is an example of such a spam blog post.  (WARNING: It’s safe to go there but DO NOT CLICK on the links in the spam blog post.  They don’t take you to where you might expect.)
3. Google cleverly recognises these spam blog posts and eliminates them from its search results, the number goes down again.

It’s also interesting to note the difference in results returned by executing the same search at google.com and the again at google.com.au.

What’s really happening here is geeks are just having fun.  Some little boys poke reptiles with a stick to see what sort of reaction they get;  Randall Munroe, talented author of the xkcd cartoon, poked the blogosphere with an intriguing Google search phrase.  Same thing.

I know many of my friends have identified themselves as xkcd fans.  I suspect others are probably also fans, they just haven’t blogged about it extensively.

And speaking of friends, our local cinema chain has re-introduced allocated seating.  It’s caused all sorts of problems and I bet they didn’t once think about this…

PS. When you go to xkcd, don’t forget to hover your mouse over the cartoon and read the pop-up alt text.  If you don’t, you’ll miss half the joke.